Page:Fighting blood (IA fightingblood00witw).pdf/118

 rather git my nose broke by a boxin' glove than git my skull broke by a crowbar. Yes, sir, them kids better be a couple of two-fisted maniacs, that's all I got to say!"

He said too much as it was, hey?

On the way back home I can't think of nothing at all but them ironworkers, and I must say that the idea of battling a locomotive works single-handed don't appeal to me at all. I had already fought before the kind of sportsmen which thinks every fight where both boys ain't cut and slashed to ribbons is a frame-up between a couple of room mates and I know what me and this Shifty McTague will be up against, if we don't half kill each other. Nate says the matchmaker was just trying to give me a pushing around, and to forget all about it, because this scrap will be the same as any other.

But it wasn't!

When we get back to Drew City I go right up to my room. That's something I wish you could of saw, no fooling! I had it fixed up swell, and, as Nate said, there was about everything in it but a race track and a swimming pool. On the floor was one of the rugs they turn out in Drew City, N. J., and ship to the Indians to sell out West, and I had so many pictures on the walls you couldn't see the paper. Besides fighting photos of me in a dozen different menacing poses, there was pictures of Dempsey, Leonard, Lynch, Carpentier, the gentleman socker, and nearly all the other champs and near champs. I cut them all out of The Police Gazette and they's only one other place I rather